Morey Receives UAlbany Seed Funding to Examine Neural Responses to Political Discussion

Professor Alyssa Morey, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, received funding under this year’s Faculty Research Award Program – category A (FRAP-A), for her proposal, “Advancing Communication Scholarship Using EEG: The FRN & Political Discussion.”

The FRAP-A awards are designed to support faculty research and other creative endeavors that have a strong potential for and lead to future external funding. In this project, Morey seeks to develop a fundamental understanding of how citizens orient, process, and respond to interpersonal political opinion political agreement and disagreement. She will use electroencephalography (EEG) recordings for this purpose. EEG monitors neural brain activity by recording voltage potentials at the surface of the scalp generated by underlying cortical neurons.

Research shows that exposure to diverse political perspectives and opinions leads to a range of political benefits, such as informed political decisions, increased political tolerance, and reduced polarization. Yet, political discussions and discussion networks are characterized predominantly by agreement rather than disagreement. “Political talk among everyday citizens is critical to the health of democracy,” Morey said. “EEG helps better understand how citizens manage interpersonal political opinion agreement and disagreement by offering the unique capacity to assess implicit constructs and processes immune from deception.”

This project is an extension of Morey’s research on psychophysiology and message processing in political communication. Using this funding, she plans to gather pilot data and develop a larger grant proposal. As only a few EEG lab facilities exist in communication programs in the U.S., Morey ultimately hopes to develop an EEG Research Lab in the Department of Communication at the University at Albany. For more information about Morey’s research, visit her faculty bio.